My friend asked me to assemble a system which in 5 years will still be regarded as powerful. He gave me a certain budget, which I was able to stretch a bit to come to this fast and powerful pc, yet silent as a mouse (ball mouses excluded):

Power Supply(USD 79.99)Seasonic Voeding M12II 620W, ModulairReviewed as very silent, and it is

Hard Disk(USD 110.95)Crucial SSD 2.5" v4, 128GB, SATA300Soiid State Disks are much faster than large hard disks. If you want more storage, add an hard disk to it, but do not install programs on it.

3.5" Card Reader(USD 24.73)Rosewill 74-in-1, 3.5", USB3.0Since a floppy driver is not used any more, we might as well put a card reader in this slot. When the LED "ACT" stays off after boot, it is defect. Contact Eminent for a replacement.

Tuning

When you assembled the computer and you first start your PC, you will notice the FSB speed is not the 1688 which we aimed for. Instead, it's running at 1333. (FSB=Front Side Bus, the speed the CPU exchanges data with the memory). This is because the motherboard is not familiar with the timings of the memory, so we have to fill this in manually in the BIOS. So hold F2 at the next start and make the following changes:

Overclock / Voltage Control:

System Voltage Control

Manual

DRAM Voltage Control

1.640 V

Overclock / Memory Timings:

Set Memory Clock

Manual

Memory Clock

x9.33

DCTs Mode

Unganged

DDR3 Timing Items

Manual

1T/2T Command timing

2T

CAS# Latency

10

RAS to CAS Delay

11

Row Precharge Time

9

Minimum RAS Active Time

27

TwTr Command Delay

5

Trfc0 for DIMM1, DIMM3

160ns

Trfc0 for DIMM1, DIMM3

90ns

Write Recovery Time

10T

Precharge Time

5

Row Cycle Time

13

RAS to RAS Delay

4

Channel Interleaving

Enabled

Bank Interleaving

Enabled

CKE Power Down Mode

Disabled

Memclock tri stating

Disabled

Note that these settings only apply to the memory specified above.

Pictures

Remarks

The intended user was not going to need a lot of graphical power. Instead of using the GTX 560 Ti you could select the cheaper and more silent GT640 :